Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - Where Is the Ark: The Covenant's Hiding Place

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

According to the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant was a gold-covered chest built to hold the Ten Commandments, an object of such immense divine power that it could level cities and strike down anyone who touched it. Then, sometime after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, it vanished from history. For thousands of years, the question of what happened to it has fueled legends and obsessive searches, with some claiming it lies hidden in a church in Ethiopia, others pointing to secret chambers beneath Jerusalem, and still others insisting it sits locked away in the vaults of the Vatican. Faith institutions have guarded its mystery for centuries, neither confirming nor denying what they may know. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson explores the legend of the Ark of the Covenant, the competing theories about where it ended up, and the enduring belief that one of history's most powerful relics may still be out there, waiting to be found.For more, follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/1828469754If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a threat at 2 a.m. that starts with, You have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis. are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe

at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. In 1983, a young British journalist named Graham Hancock traveled to Oxum, an ancient city high in the mountains of northern Ethiopia. The region was a war zone at the time, caught in a long and bloody civil war. But Hancock hadn't come for the fighting. He was there, chasing a wild rumor that this remote city was the final hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant. On the grounds of an old stone cathedral, an elderly monk stepped out of a small locked chapel to meet Hancock. He explained that he was the guardian of the ark, the only living person

allowed to step inside and look upon it. So Hancock asked him the obvious question, was the legend actually true? Was the golden chest from the Book of Exodus missing for nearly 2,600 years, really just a few feet away right behind that curtain? The old man said yes. Then he warned Hancock that it was dangerous, that it had already ruined his eyes, and that it was, in his words, a thing of fire. That's the closest Hancock would ever get to the ark. He flew home with nothing, and the mystery nodded him for the next 10 years. And Hancock isn't the only one to walk away empty-handed. Everyone who chases the ark ends up where he did, outside a locked door, told the answer is right behind it, and never allowed to look inside. So why does every trail

lead to the same dead end? And what are the people guarding the ark actually trying to hide? From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors. These aren't just theories. They're real. stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is conspiracy theories, cults and crimes, a crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. And remember, these Monday episodes will also be on YouTube with full video. You can find them every Saturday. Just search for Crime House Studios,

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Today, I'm digging into the strangest vanishing act in the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant. According to Scripture, it was a wooden chest covered in gold built to hold the Ten Commandments and God's very presence. But right around the fall of Jerusalem, 2,600 years ago, the most sacred object in the ancient world simply disappeared. People have been searching for it ever since, and the trail keeps leading back to three places. Each of them sacred to millions, a guarded chapel in Ethiopia, the contested ground beneath Jerusalem, and a sealed altar in Rome. Each one has been rumored to be hiding the lost ark. So what was the ark, really? What happened to it?

And could one of history's most powerful objects still be out there waiting to be found? All that and more coming up. More than 3,000 years ago, in what we now call the late Bronze Age, a people called the Israelites were on the move. According to the Bible, they had spent generations enslaved in Egypt until a leader named Moses led them out into the desert. They were headed for a homeland they believed God had promised them, a region called Canaan along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, but they weren't there yet. For now, they were a nation of refugees, camped in the wilderness, trying to work out what it even meant to be a people. It was in that wilderness

at a mountain called Sinai that everything changed. The Bible describes the mountain itself coming alive with thunder, smoke, and lightning, splitting the sky above the peak. The people were so terrified of the presence they felt there that they begged Moses to climb up and face it for them. So he did. He stayed on the mountain 40 days and came back down with a set of instructions from God. Not for a temple, not for a weapon, for a box. It sounds like an odd thing for God to ask for, but it made perfect sense for a people with no home. The Israelites were still wandering, with no temple, no holy city, nowhere permanent to worship. So God gave them something they could carry, a way to take his presence along with them wherever they went,

and the design was incredibly specific. The box was to be made of acacia wood, a little under four feet long and covered in pure gold, inside and out. A solid gold lid, known as the Mercy Seat sat on top, and rising from it were two golden angels. Their wings stretched toward one another. Once it was built, the ark was portable by design, with four gold rings and two long poles so the priests could carry it on their shoulders. but it came with a strict set of rules.

No one was allowed to touch the ark itself. Not the gold, not the wood, not ever. You carried it by the poles, or you didn't carry it at all. And no one but the priests were even allowed to look inside it. The Bible was blunt about the penalty for breaking those rules. You would die. The ark was also never meant to sit alone. It became the centerpiece of a portable tent called the Tabernacle.

Wherever the Israelites made camp, the tent rose at the center of it, and the ark rested behind its innermost curtain. So in a sense, God traveled at the very heart of the camp. And inside the ark itself went the most precious things the Israelites owned, the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, which the Bible says God carved with his own finger. Later tradition adds a jar of manna, the miracle food that had kept them alive in the desert, and the staff of Aaron, Moses's brother and Israel's first high priest. And that word in its name, covenant, is the key to the whole thing. A covenant was a binding agreement, a contract between God and his people.

He would protect them and make them a great nation. In return, they would live by his laws. The Ark held the physical terms of that deal, the commandments themselves. But the Ark was much more than a container. It was believed to be the actual place where God's presence rested on earth. The empty space above the mercy seat between the two golden angels was described as his throne. The Bible says that when God spoke to Moses, his voice came from there. That belief made the ark the most powerful object the Israelites could imagine,

and the stories around it only grew. When the people finally reached the edge of Canaan, the land they'd been promised, they found the Jordan River blocking their way in. According to the Book of Joshua, the priests carried the ark to the water's edge, and the moment their feet touched the river, it stopped flowing and stood up in a heap. From there, the entire nation was able to cross into the promised land on dry ground. Their first obstacle inside the new land was the walled city of Jericho, and once again, the ark led the way.

For six days, the Israelites carried it in silence around the sea. city walls. On the seventh day, they circled seven times. The priests blew their ramshorns. The people let out a great shout, and the walls of Jericho came crashing down. Victories like that let the Israelites take root in Canaan and slowly build their kingdom. But they also began to see the ark as something it was never meant to be, not the throne of their God, but a weapon they would carry into battle. And that mistake was about to cost them dearly. By the 11th century BCE, the Israelites had a fearsome rival. The Philistines were a seafaring people who had settled in the coastal plain to the west in a league of five powerful cities.

They worshipped their own gods, chief among them, a deity named Dagon. For years, the two peoples fought over the same land, and in one particular war, Israel was losing badly. So they made a fateful decision. They pulled the ark from its sanctuary and hauled it on. to the battlefield, treating it like a trump card that couldn't lose. The Philistines crushed them anyway. Tens of thousands of Israelites were killed, and worst of all, the enemy seized the Ark and carried it home as a war trophy. The Philistines set it up inside the Temple of Dagon, in their city of Ashdod, right beside the God's statue. The next morning, the statue was lying

face down on the floor in front of the Ark. The priests stood it back up. The morning after that, it had fallen again, and this time the statue's head and hands had broken clean off. Then the Philistines themselves began to suffer. A plague of painful tumors broke out in every city the ark was taken to, first Ashdod, then Gath, then Ekron. After seven months, the Philistine leaders had had enough, and their priests came up with a test. They built a new cart, hitched it to two cows that had never been yoked, and shut the cow's calves away at home. If the cows abandoned their calves and pulled the cart straight toward Israel, then the Philistines would know their suffering had come from the god of the ark,

and not from simple bad luck. They loaded the ark on board, added an offering of gold, and let the cows go. The animals walked straight for the Israelite border, lowing the whole way, and never once turned aside. The ark was finally coming home, but their reunion would prove just as deadly as its capture. It arrived at an Israelite town called Beth Shemesh, where the people came out to celebrate, and then some of them did the one thing they had been forbidden to do.

They lifted the lid and looked inside. The Bible says they were struck down where they stood, and the numbers it gives are all over the map, and flat out bizarre. Some versions say 70 men died. Others put it at over 50,000. Either way, the message was the same as it had always been. This was not an object you should mess with, and the most famous warning of all came generations later under King David.

David wanted to bring the ark to his new capital, Jerusalem, and he made the journey a national celebration, with 30,000 people escorting it to the sound of harps, symbols, and tambourines. But there was a problem. Instead of carrying the ark on its poles, the way the law demanded, his men loaded it onto an ox cart. As the procession made its way, the oxen stumbled, and the ark lurched to one side. A man named Uza was walking alongside it, and he did the most natural thing in the world. He threw out a hand to steady the ark. The Bible says that the instant

his fingers touched it, he died on the spot. The Bible itself doesn't treat the arc like a battery that shocks whoever touches it. It frames Uza's death as God's judgment, the latest in a long line of people getting careless with something sacred. But over thousands of years, that detail tends to get lost. What sticks is the simpler, scarier version. Touch the box and you die. And David was so freaked out by the whole thing that he refused to bring the ark another step, so he left it at the house of a nearby man named Obed Eidom and walked away. Three months passed, and in that time, David heard that Obed Eidom's entire household had been blessed with good fortune the whole time the ark sat under his roof. That was enough to change David's

mind. He came back for it. This time David and the priests did it properly, carrying the ark on foot, on its poles, stopping every six steps to offer a sacrifice. Eventually, David brought the ark safely into Jerusalem, and when his son, King Solomon, built the first temple there, the ark finally had a permanent home. It was placed in the temple's innermost chamber, a windowless room called the Holy of Holies, behind a heavy curtain in total darkness. Only one person on earth was ever allowed inside, the high priest, one day a year on the day of atonement. Even then, he could only go inside behind a screen of incense smoke, so he wouldn't look directly upon the presence of God. For nearly 400 years. That's where the most powerful object in the world stayed at the center of the

temple, at the center of the nation seen by almost no one. And then one day, the room was empty. In 2010, a family of four in California goes missing. Investigators spend years looking for answers. Is this a family on the run? Or is the truth far more sinister? From ABC Audio in 2020, this is what happen to the mixed days. Follow what happened to the mixed days for weekly episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Or if you can't wait, the entire series is streaming now. Add free for subscribers to 2020 True Crime Plus. Find 2020 True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts to start your free trial today. The Ark of the Covenant held its place at the heart of Solomon's temple for generations. And then at some point, it slipped out of the record completely and the long hunt to find it began.

The theories about where it went span thousands of years and three continents, and the boldest of those is also the earliest. In this telling, the ark was never lost in Jerusalem at all. It left the holy land in Solomon's own lifetime, bound for the place where this episode began, Ethiopia. Ethiopia adopted Christianity back in the fourth century, one of the very first nations anywhere to do so. It's National Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, held on to a deeply Hebrew Old Testament flavor that most other Christian traditions lost over the centuries, and the Ark of the Covenant is built into that faith at the deepest level. The heart of the claim is a medieval national epic called the Kebra Nagast,

a title that means the glory of the kings, written down about 700 years ago. It tells a story that begins with two of the most famous figures in the Bible, King Solomon of Israel and the Queen of Shiba. In the Ethiopian telling, the Queen of Sheba was an Ethiopian monarch named Makeda. She traveled to Jerusalem drawn by Solomon's legendary wisdom, and while she was there, the two of them conceived a son. She went home and raised the boy, naming him Menelik. Years later, Menelik traveled to Jerusalem to meet his father and stayed at his court for a while. When he headed home, a group of young Israelite nobles went with him, and according to the epic,

on the way out, they pulled off an astonishing heist. They lifted the real Ark of the covenant from the temple and left a replica in its place. Medelik had no idea. He only discovered what his companions had done once they were far from Jerusalem. And when he saw that the ark's terrifying power hadn't struck them dead, he took it as a sign that God wanted it with him. This theory is compelling, but it doesn't just move the Ark to a new hiding place. it rewrites the entire timeline. If the Ethiopians are right, the True Ark left Jerusalem around the 10th century BCE in Solomon's own lifetime, three centuries before the city fell to Babylon, which would make every Jerusalem theory

we're about to dig into a story about a replica. They can't both be true. Contradiction or not, this was never a fringe idea for Ethiopians. The country's emperors claimed direct descent from Menelik and Solomon, an unbroken royal line said to stretch all the way to 1974. The last emperor, Hili Salasi, even wrote that sacred bloodline right into the country's constitution. You can see the belief in every Ethiopian Orthodox Church, even now. Each one keeps its own sacred replica of the ark's tablets, called a tabot in an inner sanctuary. Without a tabot, a church can't even be consecrated. And once a year at a festival called Timcott, priests carry those replicas through the streets before hundreds of

thousands of people dressed in white. But those are all understood to be copies. The claim is that the one true original, the actual arc from the pages of the Bible, sits in the northern city of Oxum. It's kept in a small, fenced chapel beside the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, the holiest in Ethiopia. Inside lives a single monk, the guardian of the guardian. we met at the very start of this episode, and he's the only living soul allowed to walk in and lay eyes on the ark. Not tourists, not scholars, not even the patriarch who leads the entire Ethiopian church is allowed inside. Once the monk is chosen, he never leaves the grounds again. He spends his days praying before the curtain and keeping the lamps lit. And only when he feels

death coming does he name the one man who will take his place. That secrecy is exactly why no outsider has ever confirmed what actually sits behind that door, and it's what drove Graham Hancock, the journalist from the top of the episode, into a years-long obsession. In his 1992 book, The Sign and the Seal, Hancock argued the legend was essentially true, though he rewrote the route. He theorized that the Ark had been smuggled out of Jerusalem centuries after the Menelik story, during the reign of an idol-worshipping Judean king named Manasseh. From there, it spent genera. hidden in Egypt on an island in the Nile before finally reaching Ethiopia.

The book was a massive bestseller. It was also torn apart by working scholars. One archaeologist John Holliday dismissed Hancock's theory as, quote, Garbage and Hogwash. And Holliday has a point. It's a gripping story, but it's stitched together out of fragments, and that's where the whole Ethiopian debate stalls. It's all theories argued from the outside, because the one object that's the one object that's that could settle the question is kept beyond anyone's reach. But one man insists he reached it anyway. His name was Edward Ulandorf, and he was probably the most respected scholar of Ethiopian studies in the entire 20th century. He said that during World War II as a young British army

officer, he got a rare opportunity. In 1941, he made it inside the sanctuary at Oxum and personally examined the object to the church guards so fiercely. He said that what he found inside was not a gold-covered chest with ancient stone tablets inside. It was a plain wooden box, and it was empty. The same kind of Tabat replica kept in Ethiopian churches everywhere. To his trained eye, it was medieval, thousands of years too young to be the biblical ark. Years later, he put it even more bluntly, writing in a letter that the real ark of the covenant had, of course, never been in Aksum at all. The Ethiopian Church, naturally,

rejects all of this. And in 2009, for one strange day, it looked like the whole argument might finally be settled. The patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church announced that the time had come, that he would at last unveil the ark to the world. The next day, he changed his mind. There would be no unveiling, after all. He would only confirm that the ark was there, safe and intact. It was the same maddening move everyone who claims to have the ark seems to make. swear it's real and refuse to let anyone see it in the same breath, but most historians never believe the Ethiopia story to begin with. They think the ark stayed in Jerusalem for centuries after Solomon until the city met a violent end. That story begins with Josiah. The last

king the Bible ever clearly places beside the ark. He ruled over the Southern Israelite kingdom in the late 600s BCE, and according to the Bible, he was the great reformer king. During repairs to the temple, his workers turned up a long-lost scroll of God's laws. When it was read aloud to him, Josiah tore his robes in grief, shaken by how far his people had drifted into worshipping other gods. He spent his reign trying to fix it, tearing down pagan shrines, and restoring the old worship. Unsurprisingly, he was also very serious about the Ark itself, so around 622 BCE, he gave his priests an order, put the sacred ark back where it belonged, in the heart of the temple.

That's the last time the Bible clearly mentions the ark. After Josiah, the trail goes cold, and within a generation, catastrophe arrived in Jerusalem, in the form of Babylon, the great empire to the east, ruled by a king named Nebuchadnezzar. In 586 BCE, after the kingdom of Judah defied him, his army laid siege to Jerusalem. When the walls finally broke, his soldiers plundered the temple and burned it to the ground. Then they marched the survivors off into exile in Babylon.

For the people of Judah, it was the end of their world. The temple that had stood for centuries, the house built to hold God's own presence, was burned to ash and rubble. And somewhere in all that fire and looting, the holiest object their faith had ever known simply slipped out of history. The Ark of the Covenant should have turned up in the wreckage. It never did. Picture the scene once the smoke finally cleared. The temple is in ruins.

The priests who watched over the Ark are dead or in chains in Babylon, hundreds of miles away, and the holiest object in the kingdom is simply gone. This is where the real detective work starts for modern historians, and it's pretty challenging. They're working with all almost nothing, just a burned-out building, a shattered nation, and one very suspicious list. After the Babylonians stripped the temple of all valuables, the Bible gave us a list of the loot, the bronze pillars, the basins, the pots and shovels, the gold and silver vessels, all of it hauled back to Babylon. But here's the detail that has haunted people for 2,600 years. That list never once mentions the Ark. The

single most sacred object in the entire temple, and the official tally just skips right over it. And the silence is almost impossible to explain. These were careful record keepers, the kind of people who counted the shovels and listed the basins. If the Babylonians had smashed the ark or carried it off as the ultimate trophy of war, that would have been the headline of the whole disaster. Instead, there's nothing. And it doesn't stop there. About 50 years later, the exile were allowed to go home and they built a second temple on the very same spot. They rebuilt the Holy of Holies, the sacred inner room. According to Jewish tradition, the inner sanctuary of that second temple only held a bare foundation stone, rising about three fingers above the floor.

But not everyone was aware that the throne room of God was empty. Centuries after that, in 63 BCE, the Roman general Pompey conquered Jerusalem and forced his way inside, fully expecting to find the treasure at the heart of Jewish worship. He came out, stunned. There was nothing there. So by the time Rome destroyed that second temple in the year 70, the ark had already been missing for centuries, which means the ark vanished way back in the first temple period long before the Romans ever set foot in Jerusalem. So where did it go? The theories split into two big camps. Camp says there's no mystery at all. The ark was destroyed or looted and melted down and simply lost.

Some rabbis in the Talmud were certain that it was carried off to Babylon and never seen again. Others pointed to even earlier suspects. Around 925 BCE, almost 400 years before the Babylonians, an Egyptian pharaoh the Bible calls Shishak, raided Jerusalem and carried off the temple's treasures. or that later the idol-worshipping king Manasseh may have handed the gold-covered Ark over as tribute or melted it down himself. In this version, there's no miracle and no mystery. The most sacred object in Judaism was simply gone. Maybe that loss was so crushing that no one could bear to write it down,

so the Ark got silence instead of an obituary. The second camp says something very different. It says the Ark was never captured, because it was hidden away before the Babylonians ever reached it. There's an old tradition that the prophet Jeremiah saw disaster coming and carried the ark up Mount Nebo, the same peak where Moses once stood, and sealed it inside a cave. When some of his followers tried to mark the trail so they could find it again, Jeremiah stopped them.

He said the place was to stay hidden until God himself chose to reveal it. Another version has King Josiah sneaking the ark out of the temple to keep it safe, That could make sense. Josiah was the kind of king who revered the ark enough to haul it back into the temple in the first place. Hiding it from an approaching army wouldn't have been a surprising move for him. A different story says the ark never left Jerusalem at all. It was lowered into a secret chamber built beneath the temple and sealed in. And that second idea that the ark is still down there buried beneath the holiest and most bitterly contested ground on earth isn't just ancient legend. There's modern scholarship behind it, too.

An archaeological architect named Lean Ritmire, one of the leading experts on the Temple Mount, studied the great stone beneath the dome of the rock, the one Muslims call Esakra, and in that bedrock, he found a rectangular cutting. He argues it was carved to match the ark's exact dimensions, marking the precise spot where it once stood. For a certain kind of believer, an idea like that is impossible to let go. of, and in 1981, it sent one man digging. His name was Yehuda Gets, and he was the rabbi of the Western Wall, the surviving remnant of the ancient temple platform in Jerusalem. Gets was no

treasure hunter. He was a mystic and a grieving father, who had lost his son in the 1967 war for Jerusalem, and moved into the old city, partly to be near the grave. Every morning before dawn, he went down into the tunnels that run along the base of the western wall to pray at the point he believed was closest to where the Holy of Holies once stood. Gets believed the old tradition completely. He was convinced the ark had been hidden in a chamber beneath the temple mount before the Babylonians came, and that it was still there, waiting. He believed that finding it could change history, that it might even bring on the coming of the Messiah, and he was in a rare position to actually look. As the rabbi in charge of the Western Wall, Gets had authority over the maze of

tunnels beneath it, and for years he and another prominent rabbi, Shlomo Goren, had quietly been extending them, foot by foot, as part of an official excavation. Almost no one outside a small circle knew how far the digging had gone. Then in July 1981, one month after a film called Raiders of the Lost Ark opened in theaters, life imitated the movies. Gets' workers, clearing rubble deep in the tunnel, broke through an ancient sealed gateway. Behind it lay a long passage, choked with mud and water, running inward toward the heart of the mount. In his diary, Gets described the moment. He wrote that he sat there and wept, certain that the next few steps would bring him to the Ark and to redemption itself.

It didn't. The digging was going on directly beneath ground that's all. also sacred to Muslims, the dome of the rock and the wider compound known as the noble sanctuary. When word got out that Israelis were tunneling underneath it, alarmed Muslim worshippers climbed down into the passage through old openings from above. On the other side, a rumor tore through the Jewish religious students that the diggers were about to reach the Holy of Holies, and they rushed in too. The two groups met in the dark in the flooded tunnel, shouting and shoving.

it merely came to blows directly below the dome of the rock. The Israeli government moved quickly and decided to seal the passage. The archaeologist overseeing the tunnels, Dan Bahat, shut the whole excavation down. And so, in front of Rabbi Getz, workers filled the gateway with concrete. Whatever was or was not at the end of that passage, the door to it was closed for good. Gets went home, put ashes on his forehead in mourning, and prayed. He'd gotten closer to the Ark than anyone in 2,000 years, and it ended in a wall of wet cement. So the Ark is either behind a curtain in Ethiopia, guarded by a monk who won't

open the door, or sealed under Jerusalem behind Gets' wall of cement, two holy places, both sure they're close to it, neither willing to show it, and the same pattern turns up a third time at the very center of the Catholic world. For centuries, one of Rome's most important churches, the basilica of St. John Lateran, quietly claimed to have the Ark. A medieval inventory of its treasures listed the Ark of the Covenant alongside the Golden Lampstand from the temple

and the staffs of Moses and Aaron. Plenty of medieval churches have bragged about having priceless relics, and words on old parchment are easy to dismiss, but it seemed like the Lateran was the real deal. because sealed inside its high altar was an actual object that was so revered that the altar was opened only once a year on the Thursday before Easter. Then in 1745, Pope Benedict XIV decided to see it for himself. He had the sealed contents of the high altar brought out and opened. Records say there was a wooden chest inside, wrapped in silk, set in a glass case with lamps burning before it. Benedict examined it, and then he did something odd.

He didn't say what he thought it was, but the very next day he quietly ordered the object removed from the basilica. No one has documented where it went or what it was, but some people are convinced it was the Ark. The problem is the Rome theory runs into the same dead end as every other claim. The timeline. By the year 70, the Ark had already been missing for more than 600 years, years. When Pompey forced his way into that empty Holy of Holies in 63 BCE, it was long gone.

The Romans couldn't have looted something that had vanished before their empire ever reached Jerusalem. The likeliest explanation is far less exciting. Somewhere in the chaos of the medieval crusades, an ornate chest for holy relics probably made its way from the Holy Land to Rome. The Latin word for that kind of chest is Arca, and in the Middle Ages, relics were big-billed. a church said to hold the ark would draw pilgrims by the thousands. So over centuries of retelling, an archa from Jerusalem quietly got promoted into the archa of the covenant. One Latin word and a box of relics had become the ark of the covenant. As for the object Benedict pulled from that altar, no one has ever found it. In 2004, the Israel Antiquities Authority searched the Vatican

storerooms and came up empty. Ethiopia, Jerusalem. Rome. Those are the big three. But once you start pulling this thread, the arc turns up almost everywhere, buried on Mount Nebo or hidden beneath the hill of Tara in Ireland. And then they're the Lemba. They're Abantu-speaking people in Zimbabwe and South Africa, with customs that sound strikingly Jewish. They circumcised their sons, refused to eat pork, and keep a day of rest on Saturday. Their oral history says their male ancestors sailed in from a distant land to the north, and they hold one object sacred above all the rest, the Angoma Lungundu, which means the drum that thunders. They say it was built from the remnants of the original ark, and like the ark, it was also carried on

poles, too wholly to touch the ground, and said to unleash a deadly divine fire on anyone who mishandled it. And here's the startling part. When geneticists first tested lemba men, a surprising number of them, especially in their priestly buba clan, carried the Cohen-modal haplotype, a genetic marker tied to the ancient Jewish priesthood. It seemed like proof that they descended in part from Middle Eastern, possibly Israelite, ancestors.

But it's not the last word. A 2013 study cast doubt on the Lomba's Jewish origins. instead pointing toward Middle Eastern traders more broadly, so even the ancestry question is contested, and the leap from there to the literal arc is one most historians won't make. The mainstream scholarly view is not that the arc waits in a chapel, a cave, or a vault, it's that the likeliest answer is also the most deflating, that there's no lost arc to find,

that if it ever physically existed, it burned, crumbled, or was melted down for its gold in that Babylonian catastrophe, leaving no trace. The world has been chasing a ghost ever since. It's an answer worth taking seriously, and it's the one almost nobody wants. So what do you think? Was the ark destroyed back in Jerusalem 2,600 years ago? Is it still sealed in a chamber beneath the temple mount right where Rabbi Getz was digging? Or is it sitting behind a curtain in Aksum? I want to know where you land on this one. Leave a comment wherever you're listening. Here's what I keep coming back to. For a long time, I thought this was a story about a missing object. I don't think that anymore. Look at the pattern. In Ethiopia, a monk swears the ark is there, but won't show it. In Rome,

a pope examined a chest for a single night, then made it vanish. In Jerusalem, a government poured concrete over a tunnel rather than find out what lay at the end of it. Everyone who claims to have the Ark does the same two things at once. They insist the mystery is real, and they refuse to open the door. And maybe that's the point. Maybe the Ark's real power was never in the gold, or the stone tablets, or some invisible force that strikes people dead. Maybe it's in the not-knowing. Because as long as the door stays shut, the Ark can be anything, proof of God, a nation's destiny, or the most dangerous object on Earth. Open the door. door, and it collapses into one thing in one place that anyone can measure. Today, the mystery

itself is the relic, and every locked door, every sealed altar, every wall of poured concrete, is one more way of keeping it alive. Which brings me back to that monk in Oxum and what he's given his life to. He'll spend the rest of it alone in a small room guarding the one object his entire faith calls the true arc of the covenant. He may be the only person alive who knows what actually sits behind that curtain, and he's vowed to make sure the rest of us never do. That might be hard to understand. But there's a word for sacrificing everything for something you can never prove. Faith. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is conspiracy theories, cults, and crimes.

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Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pritzowski, Lori Maranelli, Roman DiAngelo, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening. Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours, you'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swab. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a threat

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